While I agree with you providers obviously have been unable to avoid "long-tail black swan events" (awesome phrase!), and that too many businesses and users jum

While I agree with you providers obviously have been unable to avoid "long-tail black swan events" (awesome phrase!), and that too many businesses and users jump to the cloud without actually understanding their architecture, availability does not mean what you are implying. 99.95% availability means your site should be "available" 99.95% of the time. It does not mean you have a 0.05% chance of a disaster, it means you will not have more then 21.5 minutes per month of outages. Those 21.5 minutes might be during your most critical time. They might even all be added together for one 4 hour downtime before you're demoing to VCs and still not violate your SLA for the year.